Five easy ways to make your business website more social

Posted 17 August 2009 11:58am by Patricio Robles with 4 comments

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Social media is an increasingly important part of the internet. But many businesses are still trying to decipher what it's really all about and how it can relate to their bottom lines. Naturally, not everyone is jumping on the bandwagon and throwing all their resources at Twitter, Facebook, et. al.

The truth is that for many businesses social media makes sense -- in moderate doses. If you're a small business owner, chances are you don't need to hire a full-time social media manager and the only thing social you're likely to get from social media experts is a lot of smooth-talk.

If your company is on a budget and doesn't have the time and money to invest in tweeting and poking, a great way to get involved with social media is to make your website more social. The good news: this doesn't need to be complicated. Here are five easy ways to make your website more social without spending and arm and a leg or putting your neck on the line.

Social Links

You almost certainly hope that the content on your website is of interest and use to somebody. And chances are that it is. So make it easy for those who find your content to be of value to share it with others. Thanks to services like AddThis and ShareThis, it's easy to give your users the ability to share your content with friends, family and on popular social media websites. Just add some JavaScript code to the desired pages and you're set.

Comments

Depending on the focus of your website and the type of content you have, allowing users to leave public comments in certain areas can be a really good idea. If you're using a CMS like WordPress to run your website, comment functionality is already built in. If comment functionality isn't native to your CMS (or you're not using a CMS at all), comments still don't have to be difficult. If you don't want to build functionality from scratch, you can use something like JS-Kit's ECHO offering to embed comments and real-time conversation to your website.

A Blog

A blog is a great tool for posting relevant, meaningful content for your website's users. Whether your company uses a blog to demonstrate its domain expertise through thoughtful posts about its industry or your company uses a blog to make management more accessible to customers and prospective customers, there are a lot of great ways to take advantage of a blog. Thanks to open-source platforms like WordPress and Joomla, setting up a blog doesn't require a degree in rocket science.

Forums

Although forums/message boards might seem very 1990s in this age of the social network, the truth is that forums are a great way to provide for customer interaction -- with each other and amongst themselves. There are a number of free open-source forum platforms, including phpBB and Simple Machines Forum. Or you could go with a popular paid option in vBulletin.

Photo Galleries

If you sell physical product and have customers who love to show off, adding a user-generated photo gallery to your site may be a worthwhile endeavor. Here again there are free open-source solutions at your service, such as Coppermine and Gallery.

Photo credit: Rob Thurman via Flickr.